大象传媒

By the time I reached the halfway house
the owners were dismantling it
plank by plank, loading up their trucks
with propane kegs, space blankets, beer.

They looked at me like I was touched,
warned me the melt was on its way
but having found the guts to come this far
I bought some kit from them to call the thaw myself:

an auger to pull corkscrews from the sea-ice,
to read stripes, though they told more
about our past than any future,
a hydrophone to lower through the bore-hole,

tune in for signs, an effervescent hiss
of bubble swarms, telling creaks of ice-sheets
big as countries, ageing into craquelure, pancaking,
crash of distant icebergs calving,

drum solos of snare shots, pedal thumps,
breaks across the toms, cymbals,
then something made me drop the mic,
lower and lower into narwhal moans,

deep belly cramps of shipwrecks,
scattering of plosives as skate wings broke
from weed and coral coppices.

deep belly cramps of shipwrecks,
scattering of plosives as skate wings broke
from weed and coral coppices.

I gave the sounds my full attention
as the mic came to rest in the silts and clays
with its ear pressed against
the three-thousand mile hum of a fibre optic cable
- the sum of our utterance -

impossible to parse, but nonetheless
a crazy kind of unison, at least a witness
to our longing to be listened to,
even if our words do drown each other out.

All this in some wind-battered shanty city,
soon to be washed up on distant rocks.
It鈥檚 just the cold and me out here, beguiled by sound,
waiting for the trapdoor to fall open.

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